In 2023, when a late-spring frost devastated many Vermont apple orchards, Shelburne Orchards was among the few spared. Not so this year. The popular pick-your-own orchard lost about 80 percent of its 2024 apple crop during a May frost.
“Nobody got hurt like we did,” co-owner Nick Cowles lamented. “Most people had a bumper crop.”
Cowles, 74, blames himself. Sort of. “Last year, when everybody else got frosted out and we didn’t, I gloated. It’s karma,” he said with a rueful grin. “Don’t gloat,” the tall, shaggy-haired orchardist advised.
Karma did deliver a small consolation prize to Cowles. He found it among the casks of aging Dead Bird apple brandy, which he has been distilling from the orchard’s fresh cider since 2009. Until this year, Cowles had blended every bottling, carefully tasting and combining brandy from different barrels to create an ideal flavor profile. This fall, for the first time, Shelburne Orchards Distillery released 225 bottles of an unblended, single-barrel, 12-year-cask-aged brandy.
In the spirits business, the distiller explained, “Occasionally you get a barrel that is just perfect by itself, that you don’t blend. It’s kind of rare.”
Cowles set a price of $267 for each 750 milliliters of the spirited expression of his orchard. He’s sold about 50 bottles so far. That revenue won’t cover the harvest loss, but it underscores what Cowles and many small-scale Vermont farmers know: Market diversification can help them survive.
In a good fruit year, Cowles said, distillery sales of about $100,000 make up roughly one-eighth of the 60-acre orchard’s revenue, but he aims to increase that figure. “A big part of us making brandy is to have some income in years that we get hurt like this,” he said.
Dead Bird brandy is modeled on the famous French spirit Calvados, which can only be made in the apple region of Normandy. Prized bottles aged for several decades can fetch close to $1,000.
Don Holly, a Vermont-based sensory professional with expertise in beverages, noted that brandies have lagged behind America’s craft-distilling boom. Apple brandy, in particular, benefits from years of aging “to really harmonize the complexity of its chemistry,” Holly said. But “who can afford, as a new business, to have your inventory sitting around for years to actually become marketable?”
Cowles appreciates that he can be patient because distilling is a complement to his core business, he said.
Holly, who has informally consulted with Cowles for about a decade, said the 12-year bottling exceeded his expectations. He praised its complex apple flavors with notes of butterscotch, its “sweet, clean aftertaste with residual earthiness” and its “calm” alcohol, buffed to softness by the years in oak. The wood provides a subtle undertone, “like a standup bass,” he described.
Of the distiller, Holly said, “He is just so conscientious and so committed. Frankly, 10 years ago, the promise was there, but he’s gone well beyond that.”
For his brandy, Cowles presses cider from 30 apple varieties he grows, ranging from McIntosh to Roxbury Russet, a traditional American cider apple. After the juice ferments into hard cider, it is double-distilled in a copper pot still that resembles a burnished Russian church dome. That alcohol is aged at least five years in American, French or eastern European oak barrels — many previously used to age port — before Cowles blends his annual release of about 1,000 bottles priced at $100 each.
Dead Bird brandy, along with an aperitif combining apple brandy and fresh cider called Pommeau, is sold almost exclusively direct to consumers at the orchard’s seasonal tasting room and online year-round for pickup only. A handful of local restaurants offer tastings.
Jackson Strayer-Benton is beverage director of the Heirloom Hospitality group, which serves Dead Bird and Pommeau at Hen of the Wood in Burlington and Waterbury and at Prohibition Pig in Waterbury. He recently visited Shelburne Orchards to taste the single-barrel release. Strayer-Benton described touring the cellar with Cowles, who excitedly delivered droppersful from different casks into his mouth like a mother bird feeding her young.
“This is a brandy that is unique to Vermont.” Nick Cowles
The sod-roofed, underground aging cave evokes a hobbit hole, while Cowles, in his customary broad-brimmed cowboy hat, suggests a Gandalfian wizard of distillation. The charismatic storyteller is always happy to share the tale behind the Dead Bird name. It dates back a century to Prohibition, when his grandfather’s moonshine still went up in flames on a subzero winter night.
The fire department quickly arrived, as did a liquor control agent, well aware that illegal stills often sparked fires. The firefighters, Cowles reported with a wink, “were in on the still.” Somehow the hose meant to quench the flames ended up drenching the liquor control agent, who was obliged to go home to change. By the time he returned, all evidence of alcohol had vanished.
The next morning, Cowles’ grandfather found a bird in the snow that had died during the commotion. “He had it bronzed and gave a copy to everyone who was there that night as a memento and a thank-you for keeping his ass out of jail,” Cowles concluded.
Strayer-Benton acknowledged that “Nick’s story, his personality, his orchard” would be enough to sell people on whatever he made, but in his view, Cowles’ brandy stands alone. “What he’s honed is a true apple brandy,” the beverage director said. “It’s the most authentic and true Vermont spirit.”
When Cowles blends, his goal is a rounded flavor that showcases the orchard’s apples without being overly fruity. He also trades small barrels back and forth with his brother-in-law, a sugar maker. A touch of the brandy aged in maple barrels adds balancing sweetness as needed.
“It would be very easy to try to mimic French Calvados,” the distiller said, “but I’m just tasting and blending and seeing what’s turning up that I like the most. This is a brandy that is unique to Vermont.”
Even Cowles was not expecting what he tasted in his cellar over the summer, however. This fall’s single-barrel vintage emerged fully formed from its Romanian oak barrel. He initially planned to blend with it, he recalled, but “the more I tasted it, the more I realized there was no way I was going to mix it. It was so good.”
Regarding the $267 price, Cowles admitted with characteristic frankness that he did some online research and “pulled a number out of my ass.” For the amount of time and resources invested, he continued more seriously, “that number felt right. I want it to be a statement. It’s going to be limited. We won’t have this particular brandy again.”
No one can replicate the singular set of factors that contribute to any one barrel, from the taste of apples in a particular season to the variables of aging over many years. Even if he tried to re-create the barrel, Cowles noted, he’d have to wait 12 years to see if it worked.
“It’s kind of a crazy business,” he said with a bemused smile, clearly relishing every part of it.
Learn more at deadbirdbrandy.com.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Raising Spirits | After 12 years in oak, an apple brandy from Shelburne Orchards comes of age”
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2024.
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